Search This Blog

Let's Read: The Once and Future King (Ch.3)

With King Pellinore gone hunting that
Questing Beast—I wonder if we will ever see him again?—our little Wart was
forced to sleep in the woods. He has an odd dream featuring the stars and
animals. It’s all inconsequential filler, so we will move on to something more
interesting.

“There was a clearing in the forest, and in
this clearing there was a snug cottage built of stone” (28).

I wonder if a witch lives there and will
try and fatten Wart up; wait, this cottage is not made of candy, so that would
be a ‘no’. Thank goodness!

This cottage is then described and I found
the description being hard to follow. At first it seemed like that it was Wart
describing it, but this couldn’t be the case since he hadn’t entered the cottage
yet and the description specified the interior, so it had to be that a-temporal
narrator. This feels odd. Specifically, why the narrator would feel the need to
go into such detail about a cottage which Wart could simply describe upon
entering himself.

“’Your name would be the Wart’

‘Yes, sir, please, sir.’

‘My name,’ said the old man, ‘is Merlyn’” (29).

Oh, SNAP! Name drop; our young hero meets
the legendary one himself—cool! I was half-expecting that our wizard mentor
wouldn’t show up until much later, or whatever. Good to see him so early,
though; a lot of the fiction I have been reading lately has really taken a
shine to introducing mentor figures way too damn late for my comfort.

I would comment on Wart’s stiff sort of
formalism, but the next passage says all we need to know…

“The magician was staring at him with a kind
of unwinking and benevolent curiosity which made him feel that it would not be
at all rude to stare back, no ruder than it would be to stare at one of his
guardians cows who happened to be thinking about his personality as she leaned
over a gate.”

On one hand, I think that describing Merlyn
as a cow is perfectly apt as it captures the sort of demure quality White seems
to be going for in his depiction. On the other hand, this is so old fashioned;
it is a kind of conservative disposition mixed with how one would think that
children would interact with adults in an aristocratic setting. Admittedly, I
know nothing of how those interactions would happen, but this moment seems
anachronistic in that White is superimposing this ‘children should be seen, not
heard’ kind of morality into a medieval setting.

After this we then get a good look at the
fantastical digs of Merlyn’s pad: thousands of books? Check! Reference to a
‘kingfisher’? Check! Phoenix, only one of which actually exists in the whole
world? Check! Gotta say, Merlyn is a pretty sweet dude. Really livin’ the life,
ya know? Oh, and Merlyn also has cases of guns, which the text remarks “would
not be invented for half a thousand years” (31). Kick-ass!

There is also this magical owl named
Archimedes which can talk. At first I thought that this so-called Owl was a
parrot, that Wart was simply mistaking him for a different bird, and that the
talking was contrived speech-phrases. But it turns out that the owl is just
fantastical since his speech becomes more and more convoluted, eventually
becoming abundantly clear that he is intelligent.

After such a formality, we move on to a
breakfast scene, one of many such moments in literature where the author
describes stuff that sound amazingly deliciously but would probably be rather
rancid in real life. Things like

“There were peaches. There were melons,
strawberries and cream, rusks, brown trout piping hot, grilled perch which were
much nicer, chicken devilled enough to burn one’s mouth out, kidneys and
mushrooms on toast, fricassee, curry, and a choice of boiling coffee or best
chocolate made with cream in large cups” (33).

Damn! I don’t know how historically
accurate all of that is or how scrumptious it would actually be, but it sure
does sound like a feast.

Soon after, though, we hear Merlyn drop a
bombshell—he was “born backwards” and “lives at the wrong end of time.” I’m not
sure if this makes him related to Benjamin Button, but he says that it makes
him able to see what everyone else calls the future, essentially. “Some people
call it having a second sight” (35). By and all, this is mighty interesting and
a creative take on where Merlyn’s powers originate. Hopefully it is explored
more in the future. (Since the narrator is a-temporal, I assume that the
narrator is Merlyn.)

Once the time based shenanigans have gone
by, Wart interacts with the owl some more and tries to give him a nickname.
This is strongly rebuked by both the owl and Merlyn, who explain that though
owls will sometimes act foolish to bemuse others, they are proud creatures.
Wart and the owl make-up and Merlyn explains he will accompany Wart back to the
castle. After all, he minus well since he is Merlyn’s new tutor.

The ending scene is so great I need to
write it all out.

“At this the Wart’s eyes grew rounder and
rounder, until they were about as big as the owl’s who was sitting on his
shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a breath seemed to gather
itself in his heart.

‘My!’ exclaimed the Wart, while his eyes sparkled with
excitement at the discovery. ‘I must have been on a quest!’” (37)

Words. Cannot.

If you read this scene and didn’t imagine
it all as an anime, then shame on you! It is so strongly connected to an
animated feature that one would need to be fairly dense to miss its storybook
qualities. Then there is the last reference to him must of being on a quest; it
is pretty self-aware fantasy! It is a book aware of its genre history.
Considering that this scene comes off the heels of King Pellinore desiring
nothing more than to settle down and live the good life, I have noticed that
White is actively trying to subvert Arthurian platitudes. We will see how this
keeps up for the rest of the book, but for now it is working fairly
consistently.

Popular Posts

Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.